It’s possible to do too much and it happens with SEO where sites get penalized by search engines for stuffing keywords. It happens with web design where the graphics compete too much by complicating the navigation and minimizing the marketing content. It happens in web marketing when the sales hype or the boastful language gets too repetitive and turns customers away.

The thing to remember about bragging is that when you really are that good other people do the bragging for you.

Is naked web marketing a frightening thought?

Marketing without pretense should be a welcome idea. You cannot get close to your market when you are not yourself. When you look and sound like something you are not how can your web market relate? And why is it so important to relate to your web market?

If you can’t relate to the person you are talking to then how can you create a customer relationship? But even before we build relationships we have to understand how different the web is from all other marketing mediums.

The web is not like anything we have known before, so we can toss out the idea that we can market like newspapers. We can toss out the idea that our web site can market like television with a bit of video. Nor is our web confined to marketing like print advertising. All of the above are too limiting.

There is no time or space on the web

The reality is that the web swallowed all those marketing mediums and then altered how they would be used on the web. It was not the web that adapted to earlier media, but rather the other way around.

In a medium that has eliminated time and distance the rules for marketing are going to change. The only limitations about time or distance for the web is that of hardware issues and the speed of light. For all intent when a web site gets published it is available to all people everywhere in the world – at once.

And then consider the volume of space that any web site can make use of. For small business web sites we can say the space is limitless because the hosted space is megabytes more than we need.

Our small business web site can pack enormous amounts of info and be accessible everywhere at once. We can work toward turning the accessibility into more visibility as we shuck off those pretentious robes and get real.

We can’t run out of time

Suppose your web site just went live today. In a year it will still be there. In 4 years it will still be there. Just keep paying your hosting fee and the site will always be there.

Newspapers come and go, TV channels come and go, Best sellers come and go, but your web is isn’t going anywhere. This is important to know.

Your web site is not going anywhere because it is actually a destination – not a vehicle. We are conditioned to think that our business web site is going somewhere, like up the ranks with search engines or maybe Oprah will feature our site and it will really get going.

The truth is that our web site is stationary and the only thing that moves is our market if, and when, we attract them.

The web has a huge marketing potential

So why is our business web site not reaching anywhere near its potential? The main reason, in my mind, is because we are not letting our web sites live up to the web’s potential. Our marketing is too limiting as it is based on old offline marketing concepts. The world has changed and we are still using 20th century marketing concepts.

The 20th century marketing methods were always based on our business, our products, our location and our services. This focus is no longer appropriate for web marketing.

Small business web sites will need to look away from their own self interests and use their web site to cater to the needs of their market. No business web sites are doing this, other than just paying lip service. Do you see your market as the boss and do you take the time to know them and to give them what they want?

Imagine your market as millions of tiny kings and queens which require your attention, and your web site as the servant giving them that attention. How would you like to serve a million kings and queens and take their gold?

What does the web do better than any other marketing medium?

I keep asking this question because the answer is going to put wind beneath your wings. The answer is simple and in hindsight it stands out as a no-brainer, and yet it seemed like a revelation at the time.

Do you want to try and answer that question on your own?

Naked web marketing (part 2) will start off answering this question and tie it into other naked marketing methods. The goal is to see how a shift in awareness can be an experience where you have both a change of mind – and a change of heart.

For you to see web marketing in a different light I first need to introduce a new picture of the web, and then a different understanding of web marketing can emerge. Following that introduction this article can then talk about what is important about social media, along with beliefs and values, as they pertain to search engines and web marketing.

In the mid 90’s a lot of media pundits were trying to say what the Internet, and more specifically the web, was all about – but no one really knew. Some compared it to television and some compared it to newspapers and others said it was most like the telephone because it behaved like a one-to- one communication media.

It looked like television because of the screen similarity, and it looked like newspapers because of the text content, and it acted like a phone conversation in how it behaved as a one-to- one communication media.

All of these different metaphors missed the primary difference that the web brought into being and that was the search engine. Without a search engine the web would be as useless as a library without index cards. It would be a tangled mess of invisible and unsorted web sites, and the great pool of information would largely be invisible.

Search engines ground the web into a usable reality through the written word when a search is conducted, and then search engines became the eyes of web users for finding their way around in the depths and darkness of billions of web pages.

Search engines give us social media

In the same way that you and I search for information others search for other people and find their groups to belong to. Just as the search engines make finding specific information a reality they also make it possible for groups to form and for people to find the group they have affinity with.

How do people find their groups? How do they search? And why do we need to know how this works in order to develop a web marketing strategy?

Deep Pockets

If your business has deep pockets then you can use contemporary marketing research methods by conducting expensive testing with market research firms. But what if you don’t have deep pockets? And what if your market is anonymous like the web market is? What options do you have?

As you are probably aware, a web market does not provide you with demographic data to help you target a market. Until a visitor to your web site has decided to contact you they remain anonymous and you do not know a thing about them in terms of marketing information. How could you even conduct a proper test if you do not have any boundaries to work within?

Your web market is an intangible, yet very real market. Your web site is simply on a fishing expedition with your keyword signals that you are using for bait. What does your market feed on and what should your keywords be?

Who is your market and where are they?

Are you going to throw your line into the big pond with all your competition and fish with popular keywords for bait? You have to wonder if your market is really in the big pond, especially if you are looking for a niche market. How can you possibly find your market without very deep pockets? And what if you are fishing in the wrong pond with the wrong bait?

I suppose, with enough time and experience, you will find out which pond to fish in and what keywords your market feeds on, but this could take years of gathering information and hours of analysis. And even then you may still be guessing.

Turn the focus inward

So far I have asked external questions and the answers you would get back are not the answers you want to hear. What keywords to use? Where to find your market? Who are they and where are they? The answers are all the same… more testing and keyword research.

What if you turned the questions inward instead? What if you asked questions you already have the answers for? Suppose you asked yourself what you value the most about your business? What is your attitude toward your market? What gives you the greatest sense of reward in running your business?

Answer those questions and you’ve got the beginnings of a marketing strategy to send signals to your market – and let them find you.

On the web, this makes finding your market easier than by using demographics because the search engines do the work for you. For those that have difficulty leaving factual data behind they could use demographic keywords and try to signal income levels, for example, but your business values will cover more ground and work better.

Why do values work on the web?

On the web people find their groups. News Groups were one of the first social networks long before they were called social networks, and people found their groups by the values they shared. The same is true for Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. Add to this list other web connections like blogs and article sources and you see that the web is a unique media for sharing values.

If you prefer to market yourself in true fashion to who you are then you would need to look on the inside of who you are and the values you hold. This sounds easier than it is, and yet it is all about integrity in marketing. In either method you need to play with psychological values, or you need to hire a marketing shrink to sort it out for you.

You can see why most web marketers are sticking to the demographic style of marketing because it feels more tangible even though the web as a medium is anything but tangible.

Marketing is a key function of any business enterprise. Business enterprises exist to serve customers and consequently earn rewards in the form of profit. These involves product design, product branding, product packaging, product publicity, product promotion, product selling and delivery. Internet has radically changed the way we interact, communicate and generally the way we live. In this revolution, marketing has not been left behind. A kind of marketing that has come up to fit into this new revolution is known as web marketing.

Web marketing refers to use of the web as a resource for marketing purposes. Any marketing strategy and plan must be able to meet the ‘4P’ of marketing. That is Product, Price, Promotion and Place. Internet, being a recent concept, is a challenge to many business enterprises that have always used the traditional mode of marketing.

Beginning with the first of the ‘4P’, that is, Product, you will find that products offered on the web are basically intangible. For example, you want to buy a pizza or a chair on the web, you won’t be able to find them in their physical form, yet you have to buy. Therefore, the web product must be packaged in such a manner that enhances the look and feel that customers would have otherwise enjoyed had they visited a physical supermarket. This requires special marketing techniques.

The next ‘P’ is the price. Factors that determine price include cost of advertisement, publicity, selling and delivery. How do you price in a situation where your advertisement bill depends on the number of clicks per product? How do you reflect the cost of delivery to clients whose geographical location is scattered all over the globe and so unpredictable? This makes pricing of web-based products to be so complex and thereby defines the complexity of marketing.

The second last ‘P’ which is promotion and which encompasses publicity and advertising is another complex phenomenon. Promotion over the web is usually done through various ways, the most common being through search engines such as Google. Unlike the traditional bill boards which can be numbered, web advertising can be done on millions of sites which fluctuate randomly. How would you be able to assess the impact of your promotion in such a volatile situation? That becomes a big challenge. This and many other such challenges require professional help which can be availed through Web Marketing Consultancy.

The last ‘P’ which refers to place is a very important part of marketing. Place in this case, refers to where the product is delivered. With web marketing, the product can be delivered through hundreds, or thousands or even millions of web sites. This too is volatile and fluctuates very fast. How are you able to tell how many shopping sites your product has been assigned by Google? How can you monitor such? These are some of the challenges faced by web marketers.

To overcome this challenge of how to deal with internet which is increasingly hooking up a lot of potential clients, Web Marketing Consultancy becomes necessary. Web Marketing Consultancy is a professional service rendered by Marketing Consultants. They are professionals engaged in devising the best marketing plan that ensures not only that the product reaches the web market but satisfies the needs of ‘4P’.

Many business enterprises are in a transitional period, trying to enter into a market that had previously been unknown and whose dynamics are unpredictable. To make sure that a business enterprise reaps maximum gains in this market, Web Marketing Consultancy becomes a key to success.